Maine lost a legend over the weekend when Gerald Talbot died at 94.

When Talbot took office in 1972 as Maine’s first Black legislator, he said “the door has now been opened” after casting his initial State House vote.

“It’s sort of like when Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball,” the Portland Democrat told a reporter at the time. “I guess I know today just how Robinson felt.”

When I met Talbot seven years ago, he told me about his long life as a civil rights leader in Maine: how he faced down the Ku Klux Klan, proposed the state’s first gay rights measure, fought for racial fairness in housing and co-authored a history of Black Mainers.

Although he seemed to me like a gentle, eloquent soul,Talbot’s tales made it clear he was also tough.

He told me that five hooded guys from the KKK once showed up at his house while he was outside watering in his yard.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Talbot asked. Then, without thinking about it, he reached out and yanked off the white hood one of them wore.

Beneath the hood was a white man with a red beard, he told me, who was so shocked that he just stood there. The Klansmen began griping that Talbot pulled off the man’s covering before slinking away.

Talbot wasn’t one to put up with nonsense. And while he confessed he sometimes felt nervous, he never let nerves or fear slow him down.

After his election in 1972, Talbot told The New York Times that he had spent 15 years “complaining about discrimination and prejudice” only to have people in Maine ask him, “Is it really that way here?”

“Because we form such a small minority in the state,” Talbot said, “Blacks suffer more from being overlooked than anything else. I hope the clout and the leverage I can get as a public official will help pull together something for all the minorities in the state.”

And that’s just what he did.

At a 2019 ceremony at the University of Southern Maine, state Sen. Rachel Talbot Ross said her father was an eighth-generation Mainer with family stories that laid a foundation for his life’s work as “a proud Black man” who drew strength from his deep roots in Maine.

In later years, Talbot worked with historian H.H. Price to edit an anthology focused on the story of Black Mainers from the earliest time. “Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People” sits on my desk as an invaluable guide.

Talbot told me that when he graduated from high school in Bangor in 1952, “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

I’m sure he would never have believed that Portland would one day name an elementary school after him, or that his papers would form the nucleus of an important African American collection at USM.

We’re all better off because of Talbot’s zeal, his courage, his willingness to “do the work” and his success in helping make Maine a better place for everyone who follows in his footsteps.